In Contact Centers, when a non-realtime communication such as fax, voicemail, email or callback request (hereinafter referred to collectively as “communications”) may have already been handled by an automated system, and then must be subsequently handled by a real person, the communications may be distributed by letting the agents pick from shared file folders of these communications and work on those they choose. Alternatively, the work may be given one or more at a time to agents for them to complete. Both of these methods have advantages and disadvantages. Work that comes from shared file folders allows agents of varying skill levels to pick communications to answer that they are competent to handle. Presumably, the newer agents are instructed to answer what they can, and the experienced agents are told to leave the “easy ones” alone and work on the more complex communications. This method is very efficient in its use of an agent's available time. However, it can lead to a surplus of communications that no one handles and can cause customer dissatisfaction because of delayed responses.
Normally a service level agreement (SLA) exists that requires the Contact Center to meet a goal such as “all emails must receive a response within ½ of a business day,” or “all callbacks must be completed within 2 hours and before the Contact Center is closed for the end of the day.” When communications are presented one or more at a time to the agents, often work is presented that could be done more efficiently by others because either the agent is more experienced and could be leaving an easier email for another, or the agent is inexperienced and not competent to handle the communication presented, causing them to redirect the email to a supervisor for assistance. Therefore, the first method is more efficient but could lead to SLA violations and the second method controls the SLA but requires more labor overall to handle the workload.
Contact centers are typically used by organizations to service customers. Traditionally, customers called into a contact center using a telephone but more and more organizations are implementing other types of media access such as mail, voice mail, web browsing, etc. to expand the ways by which their customers may contact them. Current attempts to integrate the different media into a single call center have proved ineffective because of the complexity of the various media channels and because the adoption of their use occurred at different times, so most products were poorly integrated out of several different incompatible designs. Telephone oriented ACD is very different than an email or a web collaboration session. Additionally, the response time expected by the customer varied depending on the media type used.
One approach processes a contact based on its media type. This approach ignores the fact that the same customer is treated differently based on their method of contact. For example, a customer that sends an email to a support group may have to wait for assistance longer than calling the same company's support telephone number. Another approach is to handle all contacts identically, regardless of media type in a “Universal Queue.” This “Universal Queue” approach fails to account for the magnitude of contacts and different expected response times for a customer independent of the various media types. For example, tens or hundreds of phone contacts may be received in a day whereas thousands of email messages may be received for the same day. Thus, a call center that processes all contacts as requiring an immediate response quickly becomes overloaded with emails that could have been answered with off peak labor. Furthermore, both of these approaches involve extensive modifications to the systems that underlie the call center, such as the email system, the telephony system, etc., so that the many of the original features and benefits of the underlying systems are lost. Additionally, while some previous implementations appear to integrate analog contacts, such as voice calls, and digital contacts, such as email, the actual processing of the two types of contacts is separated.
What is needed is a system that processes and prioritizes non-realtime contacts and realtime contacts separately and in parallel. What is needed to accomplish this is a system and method of handling and distributing non-realtime communications in a Contact Center when agents of various skill levels are assigned communications from a group of communications of various types such as “sales,” “accounts payable” or “service,” in a “Universal Queue” for non-realtime communications based on customer requirements rather than routing based on media type.